Deepak Obhrai

Deepak Obhrai (5 July 1950-2 August 2019) was the Conservative Party of Canada MP for Calgary East from 2 June 1997 to 19 October 2015 and for Calgary Forest Lawn from 19 October 2015 to 2 August 2019.

Biography
Deepak Obhrai was born in Oldeani, Tanganyika in 1950 to a Punjabi Indian family, and he later moved to the United Kingdom and became an air traffic controller. After facing discrimination in Britain, he returned to Tanzania for work, and he was working at a nearby airport when the Entebbe raid occurred in 1976. In 1977, he and his wife emigrated to Canada, where he became an accountant in Calgary. He soon established three dry cleaning stores and became involved in the Indian community there, and he became a Progressive Conservative Party of Canada politician, launching failed bids for Parliament in 1995 and 1996. In 1997, he was elected a Reform Party of Canada MP, and he later switched his allegiance to the Canadian Alliance and then to the newly-recreated Conservative Party of Canada. After 2011, he became the longest-serving South Asian and African MP in Canadian history, and he launched an unsuccessful Conservative leadership bid in 2017. He died in 2019 at the age of 69.